The world's getting better despite what you think

Menu

Month: October 2014

That’s a big number. In 2006 about one million people died from malaria. Nowadays about 600,000 die each year. Four hundred thousand people didn’t die of malaria last year because of the progress we’ve made against the disease. How does that compare to the current Ebola crisis? And what gets more press?

Read more about progress against malaria in this NYTimes Health article highlighting Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer’s accomplishments as the head of the President’s Malaria Initiative for the last eight years.

Our phones are with us all the time and can therefore provide better data than a patient self-reporting to a doctor. A smart phone tracking one’s health 24/7 will give ALL the data, not just what the patient is willing, let alone remembers, to share.

As reported in vox.com, a study of Brazilian election trends due to the introduction of electronic voting demonstrated that as marginalized citizens gained access to the ballot box, health outcomes improved.

These lines from Daniel Gardner’s superb book The Science of Fear sum up what we should be thinking about our present times. But we don’t. Why? Because the horrid conditions we don’t experience from the past–even the relatively prosperous Victorian era–aren’t salient. We don’t smell human waste or inhale the fumes from burning trash. We don’t wend our way through malarial puddles and animal excrement as we walk our streets. We don’t experience polio, typhus or cholera epidemics that kill thousands of people around us.

If you visit a Victorian cemetery, as Gardner does in his book, you’ll see many headstones for little children and young people struck down by diseases that have been eradicated from the US. One should feel gratitude to live in this incredible age, right?

The irony of the current Ebola scare is how puny it is compared to the yellow fever, cholera and small pox epidemics that littered our history. The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 killed more than half a million people in the US. As of today there has been one Ebola death in the United States.

Perspective, people! Let’s get all of our kids vaccinated! Let’s knock down those malaria numbers a few hundred thousand a year. And yes, let’s combat Ebola, but it’s not the cataclysmic threat too many fear it is.

Watch Louis C.K.’s hilarious send up of our tendency NOT to see the miracles that are transforming our life, despite that fact that the cornucopia of technology, health, information, connectedness and wealth advances constantly dangle in front of our faces.

“Sending money home” was something my wife’s grandfather did for his parents during the Depression. Living in rural Appalachia, Ellis Jackson got a job at the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and sent whatever money he made back home. This seems like a kindhearted, if quaint, relic from the past, right?

Between 1868 and 1969, the Cuyahoga River burned at least 13 times (Wikipedia), the worst of which occurred in 1952, although the 1969 fire (much smaller than 1952) inspired a Time article that catalyzed the environmental movement. The cause of these fires were heavy oil slicks and other flammable materials, including trash, floating on the river’s surface. For those who think that terrible pollution is a 20th and 21st Century problem, it is interesting to note that the first recorded fire on the river was witnessed three years after the end of the American Civil War.

While not perfect, this improvement reflects general improvements in most environmental indicators of pollution in developed countries like the United States, Japan, Australia and Western Europe. In the early days of industrialization, these countries poured the excrement of their factories in the most convenient river, lake or ocean. But as citizens got richer and wealth spread–basic needs met by a growing economy–rampant pollution became unacceptable. Citizens wouldn’t stand for it.

So rivers burn and people become outraged…and a Republican president creates the Environmental Protection Agency. Today there is much less pollution in the developed world then there was 50 years ago (C02 and other greenhouse gasses being important exceptions). Today pollution problems are much worse in rising countries like China and India. And it should be no surprise that China, especially, is making environmental cleanup a major priority. Forty years ago China was still gripped in its self-destructive Cultural Revolution. Who cares about air pollution when hundreds of thousands of people are dying? Now the notorious Beijing air is a top priority as most Chinese no longer just eke out a living.

This pattern–develop, pollute, enrich, reform–is described by the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). While controversial, it has been studied quite a bit and makes intuitive sense. At the start of development, countries focus on production at any costs. Tire factory in a poor country? Just blast the noxious smoke into the air to float away. But as the tire workers became richer and their children went to school, survival was not longer the number-one priority. The persistent hacking of family members led to complaints to a local bureaucrat, and thus, usually in fits and failures and eventual successes, an environmental movement emerges.

Yes, this is too neat, and Bhopals and Chernobyls loom large in the story of pollution in developing countries. Nonetheless, the clean-up of the Cuyahoga and thousands of rivers like it in developed countries speak to some important truths. People complaining to officials works. And one source of the complaints is relative affluence.

How the EKC works–When per capita Gross Domestic Product reaches somewhere in the neighborhood of $4000, pollution decreases as the pressures from the “rising” locals force better environmental protections, especially for improved air quality (dioxides and particulate matter). However, the EKC is a moderately crude model. Rising wages is not the only, or even primary, driver of environmental change; access to property rights, rule of law, fair elections–civil society–are crucial. Chernobyl happened in a totalitarian state. Nuclear energy has caused very few deaths in rich countries yet strong environmental groups and constituencies keep nuclear energy relatively small. That’s power.